About me

I'm Hilton, a copy editor and freelance writer who has lived and worked in East Asia, including Taipei, Beijing and Hong Kong for almost a decade. I have been a copy editor at newspapers and Hong Kong's largest chamber of commerce, as well as a technical writer. I mostly write about travel and books, but I've also written about slum tourism, Taiwan and Hong Kong issues, and profiled some well-known authors. Check out my blog at hcyip.wordpress.com and my writing portfolio here.

I am from the country of Trinidad and Tobago, a small two-island nation in the Caribbean that gave the world the steelpan and was a British colony up until 1962, when it gained its independence. Famous people from Trinidad include VS Naipaul, the Nobel Literature Prize laureate; Brian Lara, the record-breaking cricket batsman; and Dwight Yorke, the former Manchester United star striker who helped them win the treble in 1999, as well as a notoriously crooked former FIFA vice president who I shall not name.

I speak English, which is my native language for both speaking and writing, as that is Trinidad's official language. I am also conversational in Cantonese and Mandarin, which I have used at work and in daily life. I spoke Cantonese growing up, and I speak a fair bit of Mandarin from living in Taiwan and China.